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Stony George and ‘phoney’ Blair in spotlight at Evian

EUROPE’S media focus on the Group of Eight summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, and, as usual, violent protests and a disingenuous handshake get more coverage than anything actually accomplished by the world’s most powerful leaders. Come to think of it, nothing was accomplished.

This fact is not lost on Lausanne daily 24 Heures, which wins the award for best front-page coverage of the summit. Its layout sums it all up quite well from the Swiss point of view: “Tout ça”, reads the headline on a photograph of silhouetted barbed wire and soldiers, “pour ça?” responds a picture below it of Jacques Chirac with his hand on US President George W. Bush’s shoulder.

Indeed Switzerland got the short end of the summit stick. France got all the glory but, by sealing off Evian (which is nestled quite snugly between Lac Leman and the Alps), the gendarmes forced rioters to express their frustrations on the normally peaceful towns of Geneva and Lausanne.

Geneva’s Le Temps is critical of police operations in the city during the gathering. The paper says that on Sunday – the summit’s first day – only the deployment of German rent-a-cops prevented a full night of rioting.

“If the authorities don’t want to call on the Germans each time a danger appears, they have to provide their police forces with an intervention concept which is adapted to new threats,” it warns. (Some papers note a historical curiosity: German police with jurisdiction in neutral Switzerland.)

British papers, however, focus on Tony Blair’s staunch denial during the G8 summit that he had doctored his famous dossier on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and had secretly agreed with Bush to wage war on Iraq. Unfortunately for the UK prime minister, the media highlight not the level of his credibility but that of his perspiration – in what must have been the sweatiest appearance before TV cameras since Albert Brooks got behind an anchor desk in Broadcast News.

The Independent’s description is typical. “Sweating profusely at a G8 summit press conference in Evian,” it reports, “Mr Blair appeared uncomfortable in the extreme as he rebutted charges his spin machine had ‘duped’ the country into war.” This is unfair to Blair, however. The story does not mention until much later the fact that his sweat was the result of the sweltering heat in the UK press tent, where for some reason the air-conditioning had been switched off prior to the briefing. (Blair might need to effect some regime change in his press advance office.)

Dutch papers, meanwhile, analyse the symbolism on display in St Petersburg and Evian. De Volkskrant goes into great detail describing Bush’s body language at the consecutive summits: an “embrace” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, a “tap on the shoulder” for German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and, as for French leader Jacques Chirac, the paper says Bush ignored him in St Petersburg and gave him only a “firm but curt” handshake in Evian.

“This gesture was without a doubt less cordial than, for example, the arm around the shoulder that Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi got from Bush on this occasion,” it notes.

But more important than the protocol, Algemeen Dagblad notes in an editorial comment, is the renewal of relations between Europe and the US. “The fact that the two are once again talking must be seen as a positive note,” it says. “At any rate there is every reason for both sides of the Atlantic to tone down the rhetoric and to find a pragmatic way of allowing their common interests to prevail. Europe needs America, but the fact that the Americans cannot do without their old allies in the long run must compel them to engage in a new dialogue.”

French and Austrian papers…were on strike. So no headlines there – not even coverage of their own strikes, sorry, ‘social movements’.